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Mine-imator
Mine-imator is a 3D animation software created by David Norgren back in August 21st, 2012. The program has since been in development for four years, undergoing various improvements, bugfixes, and graphical updates. It is well known for being easy to use, graphically pleasing, and being freeware. The program reached critical acclaim after the release of Frossa's Meet the Pyro in Minecraft video. Since that video's release, other youtube channels have started forming and thus the popularity. Origin Mine-imator was long in conception before it's first beta version. (See Version History ) This story had been told by David himself and is as follows: In 2009 I wanted to create a rather complex 3D game (naive and ambitious teen as usual) and I made a simple 3D animating program for the in-game animations, featuring the characters found in the game. Needless to say, I lost motivation to work on the game due to my limited 3D experience. During the next year there was a GameMaker competition and I tried making yet another 3D game, this time a minigame collection à la Mario Party. I evolved my 3D animator slightly to improve the interface and support more characters. This project failed as well due to a lack of minigame ideas. At around October 2010 I found Minecraft and during the course of 2011 I became more familiar with its mechanics, making tools such as a redstone simulator, a redstone display generator and most notably a music creator (Minecraft Note Block Studio ). Early 2012. Frossa was struggling to animate TF2 characters beyond what Minecraft allowed and he used my primitive 3D animator made for the competition game, with a Steve character hacked in (with change-able skin). Since the program was very simple and the controls were crude, the end result were choppy, short movements as shown in Meet The Spy In Minecraft . I told him that I could make a program specialized in animating Minecraft characters (at this point there were no plans to support items/blocks or scenery), so this would be a quick project, right? The name Mine-imator (short for Minecraft Animator) was decided almost immediately.Now we're in March 2012. Progress went very slow since the project turned out to be reasonably complex compared to anything I'd done before. I wanted the program to support a keyframe based system and multiple characters, as well as a resize-able interface. During the summer I experimented with generating 3D models from schematics in GameMaker , and later decided that this could be implemented into Mine-imator to create some effects like the Pyro's flame thrower. I had no plans to implement .avi exporting, so Frossa would have to record the program with a screen recorder as the animation was playing (and then use chrome key in Sony Vegas to get rid of the background). With the release of SFM came the idea to release Mine-imator to the public, nothing I had ever considered before. It was just meant to be a simple thing Frossa used for his animations, but I realized that, with the newly created schematic file importer, it could be used to make entire Minecraft movies, so I implemented a simple .avi exporter as Frossa worked on Meet The Pyro In Minecraft . Mine-imator were to be released publicly a few days after the Meet The Pyro upload in August 2012. As Frossa's video got more viral, more hype was generated and when the crude program was released, it became an instant-hit. I was overwhelmed by the amount of downloads and feedback as the Note Block Studio (or any earlier project) had never had this level of success. Work continued throughout 2012, with slightly more features being added, perhaps most notably the long requested bendable arms. During 2013 I took a break to work on other things including TF2 map making (pl_minecanyon ), web browser add-ons (Fix'dTube) and hacking file formats. I always had the idea to bring Mine-imator to a new level as my 3D experience had greatly evolved at this point. GameMaker 8.1's 3D was rather primitive and the engine didn't fully utilize the CPU, resulting with slow loading times (especially for schematics). I knew GameMaker:Studio had been released, but it was known to be very unstable from fellow GameMaker users, so I waited until YoYoGames (the creators of GameMaker) hopefully had sorted the big bugs out. In late 2013, I picked up Mine-imator again and decided to upgrade it to GameMaker:Studio for converting the program into C++ code which would greatly speed things up. And so I did. Huge schematics could be imported lightning fast and graphics were rendered much more efficiently due to Studio's improved 3D. I named the project Mine-imator 1.0.0 as I decided that it was finally time to leave beta, and scheduled a release in January 2014. But then I found shaders... ...and Mine-imator animations would change forever. Implementing this was of course no easy task, and as such pushed the release even deeper into 2014, much to the dismay of some. I also realized GameMaker:Studio could support some of the ideas I wanted to implement for a long time, such as a particle editor, advanced rendering and modifying 3D models in real-time for waving leaves/grass. During this time I didn't have a fixed date planned and just said "2014" when someone asked. Revealing all these new features caused a lot of hype though, so I decided to finally release the darn thing fully in May, which would have been possible if it weren't for a random encounter with a huge school project that absorbed crazy amounts of free time. I release a demo with some missing features at the promised date (I'm a man who keeps his promises) but one thing became evident (and my doubts about GameMaker:Studio were confirmed): GameMaker:Studio games had never been tested on this scale, EVER. Studio was relatively new and not many GameMaker users have had the chance to create gigantic games with it yet and as such YoYoGames never had the time to sort out some bugs that a diverse community such as mine could have, including filename errors for non-English users, graphics cards not handling shaders and much, much more. It didn't help either that Mine-imator 1.0.0 was a GIGANTIC project. Without doubt the largest project I had ever done at this point and that I will do for a decent while. It definitely was pushing the limits of what GameMaker was capable of. Due to this I spent most of the summer trying to work around YoYoGames' bugs and I still am to this day, and hopefully the idea to officially release a relatively bug-free version of this beast in 2014 will be realized. Reception The program has been highly praised for being a well functional program and being capable of much more than has been seen. Easily being able to create simple animations quickly and standing the test of making hardcore animations with a lot of moving parts. Since 0.7's release, it has gained quite an active community on Youtube and the Mine-imator Forums alike. It has also been respected for it's active community that tends to expand the limits of the program creating rigs, which is now a key feature of the program. It has been recieving slight negativity for not being able to emulate the graphical capability of most other animation programs. Category:Google